Living in Integrity with Ren Hurst Episode 5 Science of harm part 1
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New World Sanctuary Foundation
In a world where conformity rules
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One woman
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looked within
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and found herself
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A woman
who became
a trailblazer
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Living in integrity
with Ren Hurst
Hi, Ren Hurst here again.
I'm the author of Riding on the Power of Others
and this is the 5th video that
i'm doing and just to let everybody know, we're gonna put a numbered
series together that's going to stay on You Tube so
everyone will have access to it. But today,
i've decided to try to handle the topic of the science
of the harm of riding. So, it's getting a lot of requests
and i'm not exactly sure what people are looking for
because the science,
even though it was really important in my own personal journey
for a really well rounded understanding of
why i wanted to stop. It really had
nothing to do with the moment that changed
everything which is written about specifically
in my book and the science,
as great as it is to be able
to prove that it's harmful physically,
i don't know if you noticed but my arm is full of tattoos and physical harm
is not that big of a deal to me.
What is a big deal to me is
using someone for my own personal needs
and desires and wants and exploitation,
which is what makes horseback riding not vegan,
not necessarily the physical harm, that's a given.
I mean, you're putting a substantial amount of weight on an
elongated spine. You don't need to be a scientific
expert to understand that there's gonna be harm caused
from that. Just walk around
on all fours and put somebody
that's at least 10% or more of your weight on your back
and see how it feels in a little while and you'll know exactly
what i'm talking about. However, i do have
10 full years of very dedicated
time in the field where i was researching
this and trying to learn everything i could.
Not to find the harm of the science of riding but
just as a holistic horse care professional trying to find
how we were harming horses and what worked ans what didn't work
and what was real and what wasn't. And i'm a little
aversive to scientific research in general
because this path of truth has
led me down some pretty scary roads where
i'm finding that funding specific research
can turn into a lot of science that isn't true,
much like the science
that supports eating meat to give you an example.
This is Cash and this is Travis.
And Travis is a perfect example
here,ok. Let's just start with Travis.
Travis is here because early on
in my career as a natural hoofcare practitioner,
i got a call from a woman
who was desperate to try something different
because Travis here had foundered
very badly and
she was married to a vet,
they were separated so she knew the veterinary
community quite well in the area that i lived
and let me tell you something about the area that i lived in Texas.
There were probably more horses than humans, it's the cutting horse
capital of the world, so there was no
shortage of scientific experts
in the field of horses to be around
which is one of the ways i learned so much, however, this is not
a testament to that. So, i got this call
and this horse in a tremendous amount of pain and she's heard
that i can fix founder.
And i'm pretty new,
i know how to do it through training but he was actually
my very first acute founder case
that exhibited all the textbook symptoms
of a horse in excruciating pain with severe rotation.
So, i show up to meet this horse and he's in
a really bad way and i tell her, yeah, there's a lot
i can do for him if you'll give me a chance
but she was really skeptical because all of the veterinarians
around her were telling her that it would be
more humans to put him down
at this point and that he was in a tremendous amount of pain.
And so i told her, just trust me,
give me a little time to do what i've been trained to do
and we started. And, within
2 to 3 weeks, she couldn't handle it.
She couldn't stand seeing him uncomfortable,
she couldn't stand thinking about
the fact that maybe she had caused it in some way, which
i think was probably the bigger aspect of this. And
she started calling her other
veterinarian friends and asking for their opinion
and every single one of them told her
to put him down. So, she called me
crying one night and said that that's
what she was going to do and i pleaded with her and i said
i know how to fix this and i know it's not common
and i know there's a lot of research out there
that says that it can't be done but this is
my training and this is what i know how to do and so i asked her
if she would just let me come pick him up. So i did
the next morning and i took him home
and i radically changed his lifestyle
to one that was very stress free and natural
for him. and in 6 months,
i got new xrays of his hooves
and his coffin bones were almost
completely returned to their natural position.
He has no lameness, no sign that
he had ever foundered so badly and
his story was published
in the Horse's Hoof magazine
with xrays to show the before and after
pictures. And at the time
i was really well connected with the
scientific horse community in that area of Texas.
It went against
what everyone said was possible.
So, forgive me if i'm not
a huge fan of just what science says.
And Travis is one of the biggest
reasons for that and here
he stands with no sign that he's ever foundered
and quite honestly before i quit
riding and training, this is the horse responsible
for teaching an enormous amount of my students that horses
could be ridden without bridles, without bits
and without shoes in rocky terrain,
even after he had foundered.
And, you know, there's something to be said about
scientific research and then, there's something
to be said about living hands on proof
and this horse is all the proof that i need to trust
what's right in front of me rather than some
research that somebody else did
and words that somebody else said. That said,
these are just words, you have to do your own research
and you have to follow your own heart to know what's true about
this stuff or not. So, i'll just take you a little bit through
my experience. It started with bits
because there was just something about
putting a piece of metal in a horse's mouth that started
really not feeling right to me. And so
i started doing the research on that and there's a book out there by Dr
Cook and Dr Strasser called Metal in the Mouth.
That book is the only thing you'll ever need to never put a piece of metal
in a horse's mouth again. And, there's also a book
called Riding Free which is about liberty riding that explains
that a little bit as well in terms of
some of the physical effects
of putting a bit in the mouth to control a horse.
Bits should be a given. It's a piece of metal
going into the sensitive structures of an animal's mouth.
And if you really wanna understand what that
looks like, get your hands on a horse skull
and see where that bit rests and do a little bit
of anatomical research and see the nerves
and the soft tissues that the bit is sitting on
just at rest, before so-called soft
hands take a hold of the reins.
So, that is the easiest one to debunk in terms
of the harm it causes to horses.
So, in this 10 years period when i was really
advancing my career and getting well connected and spending time
with all sorts of experts and all sorts of different areas
of holistic study, that's where my learning was coming from.
It was hands on, in the field, spending time with these people,
getting to know them, having them show me
what their work was and how it was applied.
I learned so much about the effect of cortisol
in the body. Of course, we hear and know about stress
in humans but it's not different for horses and i've got to say
the most important thing i ever learned was that
stress is the thing that kills horses and causes them
the most harm. And you don't have to get on a horse
to cause a tremendous amount of stress. Just the traditional ways
we care for and manage horses are very, very
damaging. In fact, one comment
that was in response to one of these videos
was a woman defending her care
of her horse in all sorts of
these traditional manners that
at this stage is just worlds apart from
where my understanding is.
Floating teeth every year is
extremely damaging, you gotta understand the neurobiology
that connects the horse's teeth to the rest of
their entire body and how it all works
together and i really don't recommend that
kind of work. And shoeing horses,
i mean, it just depends on where you're at the spectrum of what
you understand about horse care in general and how holistic
the approach is or how traditional and symptom
treating it is. So, there's that, so when we're talking about actually getting
on a horse, first of all, i still think it's really
important to reiterate that the issue
with riding is that you have to condition the horse
to accept a rider which is manipulation
and coercion and control and exploitation.
That is what makes riding horses
not vegan.
To be continued in the next episode...